Apparently the most important issue is not the unsustainability of deficit spending, lack of fiscal responsibility, or the tough problems of balancing expensive bailouts with expensive defaults. It is making sure the timing of a Greek default does not negatively affect Obama's re-election. From the Independent (UK) entitled, "Obama asks eurozone to keep Greece in until after election day"

American officials are understood to be worried that if they decide Greece has not done enough to meet its deficit targets and withhold the money, it would automatically trigger Greece's exit from the eurozone weeks before the Presidential election on 6 November.

They are urging eurozone Governments to hold off from taking any drastic action before then – fearing that the resulting market destabilisation could damage President Obama's re-election prospects. European leaders are thought to be sympathetic to the lobbying fearing that, under pressure from his party lin Congress, Mitt Romney would be a more isolationist president than Mr Obama.

"European leaders are thought to be sympathetic to the lobbying fearing
that, under pressure from his party lin Congress, Mitt Romney would be a
more isolationist president than Mr Obama."

Proving once again that the Europeans keep all of the really good drugs for themselves. Bastards.

http://twitter.com/ngvrnd nzc

So, my lefty friends point out that there are no sources for these claims, and no way to know if it's BS or not. And I'm afraid they may be right. Do you know anything that would substantiate this?

LarryGross

what can you say about any paper or blog that willingly promotes unsubstantiated claims? The best you can say is they are playing the confirmation bias game.

SamWah

Quel suprise! It sounds like something they'd do, and it's not coming from US media.

nick caruso

To be clear, I was asking the blog owner if he could substantiate the claims made in the article.

LarryGross

yup.. but it still got printed before an answer was received. This is part of the confirmation bias process...you print before you determine the truth.. then forget the mea culpa.. and the assertion starts to become the perceived truth because so many blogs are more than happy to print the unsubstantiated assertion. It's rampant on the web now.. just do a Google search on the key words... like "Obama asks to hold off Greece bankruptcy" and you'll see that all the anti-Obama folks are more than happy to propagate that unsubstantiated assertion. ( to be fair, all sides do it - but it's more and more NOT a search for truth but a sought confirmation of one's own biases).

obloodyhell

Would that the libtard idiots around the world gave HALF the circumspection to their own sources that they're giving to questioning THIS source.

There's be a lot fewer parrots flying around, that's for sure.

LarryGross

How does this hit you: " A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in military, political, and organizational contexts."

or this:

"
Confirmation biases are effects in information processing, distinct from the behavioral confirmation effect, also called "self-fulfilling prophecy", in which people's expectations affect their behaviour to make the expectations come true.[2] Some psychologists use "confirmation bias" to refer to any way in which people avoid rejecting a belief, whether in searching for evidence, interpreting it, or recalling it from memory."

nick caruso

People hate to hear about their own foibles. It's (related to/partially explanatory of) the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think. Everyone suffers from these sorts of things.

And it can reinforce the confirmation bias -- given the choice of admitting they are wrong, and moving on, most people get moving. It's a positive feedback loop.

Our esteemed host makes much hay of this sort of thing on the part of the AGW establishment.

The thing is, I'm a libertarian. I mostly agree with the owner of this blog. But I got called on cross-posting this. And I was embarrassed. And I admitted I was at fault and marked my cross post to indicate that I had made a mistake.

It would be best to put up sources or annotate (not delete) the post as rhetoric.